Composer Kurt Kuenne

Composer Kurt Kuenne

Kurt Kuenne is an award-winning filmmaker and composer of both fiction and documentary films. He is a winner of the AMPAS Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting who studied at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing, while concurrently studying Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television under renowned film composers Buddy Baker and David Raksin at the USC School of Music. He has scored all of his own films as director, which include the teen drama Scrapbook (1999), for which he was named one of the top 25 new faces of indie film by Filmmaker Magazine, the documentary Drive-In Movie Memories (2001), which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival before running nationally on PBS, and the popular musical comedy short film series of Rent-A-Person, Validation, Slow and The Phone Book, which played more than 130 festivals around the world, winning more than 40 awards. His documentary Dear Zachary was released in 2008 by Oscilloscope Laboratories and MSNBC, was named one of the top 5 documentaries of the year by the National Board of Review and was named one of the top 100 documentaries of all time by PBS POV; his score for Dear Zachary was nominated for Best Documentary Score of 2008 by the International Film Music Critics Association. His subsequent feature film, Shuffle (2011), starring TJ Thyne of TV’s “Bones”, played over two dozen film festivals, winning a dozen awards including the Frank Capra Award, and was released in 2012 by Screen Media Films. He is the co-writer, editor and sound designer of the acclaimed Warner Bros. documentary Batkid Begins. His work as composer also includes scoring the restoration of the silent classic Cyrano de Bergerac (1925, Kurt’s score was premiered by the San Diego Symphony in 1999); the award-winning score for Preston Tylk, the feature film debut of NBC’s The Blacklist creator Jon Bokenkamp; and writing the music and lyrics for an award-winning stage musical adaptation of the New York Times bestselling novel The Looking Glass Wars.